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Fellow died: another wrote to Sandwich to know if he was not to vote for Parry according to his engagement,-" No, he must vote for one who had been tutor to the Duke of Bedford," who by that means has carried it. My Lady Lincoln was not suffered to go to a ball which Sandwich made the other night for the Duke, who tumbled down in the middle of a country dance; they imagined he had beat his nose flat, but he lay like a tortoise on the topshell, his face could not reach the ground by some feet. My Lady Anson was there, who insisted on dancing minuets, though against the rule of the night, with as much eagerness as you remember in my Lady Granville. Then she proposed herself for a Louvre; all the men vowed they had never heard of such a dance, upon which she dragged out Lady Betty Leveson,' and made her dance one with her.

At the last ball at the same house, a great dispute of precedence, which the Duchess of Norfolk had set on foot but has dropped, came to a trial. Lord Sandwich contrived to be on the outside of the door to hand down to supper whatever lady came out first. Madame de Mirepoix and the Duchess of Bedford were the rival queens; the latter made a faint offer to the ambassadress to go first; she returned it, and the other briskly accepted it; upon which the ambassadress, with great cleverness, made all the other women go before her, and then asked the Duke of Bedford if he would not go too. However, though they continue to visit, the wound is incurable: you don't imagine that a widow' of the House of Lorraine, and a daughter of Princess Craon, can digest such an affront. It certainly was very absurd, as she is not only an ambassadress but a stranger; and consequently all English women, as being at home, should give her place. King George the Second and I don't agree in our explication of this text of ceremony; he approves the Duchess-so he does Miss Chudleigh, in a point where ceremony is out of the question. opened the trenches before her a fortnight ago, at the masqueradebut at the last she had the gout, and could not come; he went away fort cross. His son [the Prince of Wales] is not so fickle. My Lady Middlesex has been miscarrying; he attends as incessantly as Mrs. Cannon. The other morning the Princess came to call him to go to Kew; he made her wait in her coach above half an hour at the

He

1 Daughter of John, second Lord Gower. Married in 1751 to the Hon. John Waldegrave.-Dover.

2 Madame de Mirepoix, eldest daughter of Prince Craon, and widow of the Prince of Lixin.-WALPOLE.

3 The midwife.-WALPOLE. Mrs. Kennon, "the virtuosa wife" of Walpole's Strawberry Hill catalogue.-CUNNINGHAM.

door. You will be delighted with a bon-mot of a chair-maker, whom he has discarded for voting for Lord Trentham; one of his blackcaps was sent to tell this Vaughan that the Prince would employ him no more; "I am going to bid another person make his Royal Highness a chair."-"With all my heart," said the chair-maker; "I don't care what they make him, so they don't make him a throne." The Westminster election, which is still scrutinising, produced us a parliamentary event this week, and was very near producing something much bigger. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt moved to send for the High-Bailiff to inquire into the delay. The Opposition took it up very high, and on its being carried against them, the Court of Requests was filled next day with mob, and the House crowded, and big with expectation. Nugent had flamed and abused Lord Sandwich violently, as author of this outrageous measure. When the Bailiff appeared, the pacific spirit of the other part of the administration had operated so much, that he was dismissed with honour; and only instructed to abridge all delays by authority of the Housein short, "we spit in his hat on Thursday, and wiped it off on Friday." This is a new fashionable proverb which I must construe to you. About ten days ago, at the new Lady Cobham's' assembly, Lord Hervey' was leaning over a chair talking to some women, and holding his hat in his hand. Lord Cobham came up and spit in it— yes, spit in it!—and then, with a loud laugh, turned to Nugent, and said, " 'Pay me my wager." In short, he had laid a guinea that he committed this absurd brutality, and that it was not resented. Lord Hervey, with great temper and sensibility, asked if he had any farther occasion for his hat?" Oh! I see you are angry !" "Not very well pleased." Lord Cobham took the fatal hat, and wiped it, made a thousand foolish apologies, and wanted to pass it for a joke. Next morning he rose with the sun, and went to visit Lord Hervey; so did Nugent: he would not see them, but wrote to the Spitter, (or, as he is now called, Lord Gob'em,) to say, that he had affronted him very grossly before company, but having involved Nugent in it, he desired to know to which he was to address himself for satisfaction. Lord Cobham wrote him a most submissive answer, and begged pardon both in his own and Nugent's name. Here it rested for a few days; till getting wind, Lord Hervey

1 Anna Chamber, wife of Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, afterwards Earl Temple.-WALPOLE.

2 George, eldest son of John, late Lord Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol; whom this George succeeded in the title.-WALPOLE.

2

wrote again to insist on an explicit apology under Lord Cobham's own hand, with a rehearsal of the excuses that had been made to him. This too was complied with, and the fair conqueror' shows all the letters. Nugent's disgraces have not ended here: the night of his having declaimed so furiously against Lord Sandwich, he was standing by Lady Catherine Pelham, at the masquerade, without his mask she was telling him a history of a mad dog, (which I believe she had bit herself,) young Leveson, the Duchess of Bedford's brother, came up, without his mask too, and looking at Nugent, said, "I have seen a mad dog to-day, and a silly dog too."-"I suppose, Mr. Leveson, you have been looking in the glass."-"No, I see him now." Upon which they walked off together, but were prevented from fighting, (if Nugent would have fought,) and were reconciled at the side-board. You perceive by this that our factions are ripening. The Argyll carried all the Scotch against the turnpike they were willing to be carried, for the Duke of Bedford, in case it should have come into the Lords, had writ to the sixteen Peers to solicit their votes; but with so little deference, that he enclosed all the letters under one cover, directed to the British Coffee-house!"

The new Duke of Somerset' is dead: that title is at last restored to Sir Edward Seymour, after his branch had been most unjustly deprived of it for about one hundred and fifty years. Sir Hugh Smithson and Sir Charles Windham are Earls of Northumberland and Egremont, with vast estates; the former title, revived for the blood of Percy, has the misfortune of being coupled with the blood of a man that either let or drove coaches-such was Sir Hugh's grandfather! This peerage vacates his seat for Middlesex, and has opened a contest for the county, before even that for Westminster is decided. The Duchess of Richmond takes care that house

1 George, Lord Hervey was a very effeminate-looking man; which probably encouraged Lord Temple to risk this disgusting act of incivility.-DOVER.

2 Wraxall, in his Historical Memoirs, vol. i. p. 139, relates the same story, with a few trifling alterations.-WRIGHT.

3 The Hon. Richard Leveson Gower, second son of John, second Lord Gower, Member for Lichfield. Born 1726; died 1753.-Dover.

Archibald Campbell, third Duke of Argyll, during the lifetime of his elder brother, Duke John, Earl of Islay. He died in 1765.-DOVER.

5 In Cockspur Street, and long a house of call for Scotchmen. It was kept by the sister of the Bishop of Douglas, and at another period by Mrs. Anderson, described in Mackenzie's Life of Home, as "a woman of uncommon talents, and the most agreeable conversation." It still exists.-CUNNINGHAM.

Algernon, last Duke of Somerset, of the younger branch.-DOVER.

shall not be extinguished: she again lies in, after having been with child seven-and-twenty times: but even this is not so extraordinary as the Duke's fondness for her, or as the vigour of her beauty her complexion is as fair and blooming as when she was a bride.

We expect some chagrin on the new Regency, at the head of which is to be the Duke; "An Augustum fessâ ætate totiens in Germaniam commeare potuisse," say the mutineers in Tacitus-Augustus goes in April. He has notified to my Lord Orford his having given the reversion of New Park to his daughter Emily; and has given him leave to keep it in the best repair. One of the German women, Madame Munchausen, his minister's wife, contributes very kindly to the entertainment of the town. She is ugly, devout, and with that sort of coquetry which proceeds from a virtue that knows its own weakness so much as to be alarmed, even when nothing is meant to its prejudice.' At a great dinner which they gave last week, somebody observed that all the sugar-figures in the dessert were girls: the Baron replied, "Sa est frai; ordinairement les petits cupitons sont des garsons; mais ma femme s'est amusée toute la matinée à en ôter tout sà par motestie." This improvement of hers is a curious refinement, though all the geniuses of the age are employed in designing new plans for desserts. The Duke of Newcastle's last was a baby Vauxhall, illuminated with a million of little lamps of various colours.

We have been sitting this fortnight on the African Company : we, the British Senate, that temple of liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have this fortnight been pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes. It has appeared to us that six-and-forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone !-it chills one's blood. I would not have to say that I voted in it for the continent of America! The destruction of the miserable inhabitants by the Spaniards was but a momentary misfortune, that flowed from the discovery of the New World, compared to this lasting havoc which it brought upon Africa. We reproach Spain, and yet do not even pretend the nonsense of butchering these poor creatures for the good of their souls!

I have just received your long letter of Feb. 13th, and am pleased

1 Dodington, in his Diary of the 25th of February, says, "I met the Prince and Princess by order at Lady Middlesex's, where came Madame de Munchausen: we went to a fortune-teller's, who was young Des Noyers [p. 25], disguised and instructed to surprise Madame de Munchausen, which he effectually did."-WRIGHT.

that I had writ this volume to return it. I don't know how almost to avoid wishing poor Prince Craon dead, to see the Princess end upon a throne.' I am sure she would invert Mr. Vaughan's wish, and compound to have nothing else made for her, provided a throne

were.

I despise your literati enormously for their opinion of Montesquieu's book. Bid them read that glorious chapter on the subject I have been mentioning, the selling of African slaves. Where did he borrow that? In what book in the world is there half so much wit, sentiment, delicacy, humanity?

I shall speak much more gently to you, my dear child, though you don't like Gothic architecture. The Grecian is only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments, look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake-house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities. I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings, as in grounds or gardens. I am sure, whenever you come to England, you will be pleased with the liberty of taste into which we are struck, and of which you can have no idea! Adieu!

304. TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, March 11, 1750.

"Portents and prodigies are grown so frequent,

That they have lost their name.'

"2

My text is not literally true; but as far as earthquakes go towards lowering the price of wonderful commodities, to be sure we are overstocked. We have had a second, much more violent than the first; and you must not be surprised if by next post you hear of a burning mountain sprung up in Smithfield. In the night between Wednesday and Thursday last, (exactly a month since the first shock,) the earth had a shivering fit between one and two; but so slight that, if no more had followed, I don't believe it would have been noticed. I had been awake, and had scarce dozed again—on a sudden I felt my bolster lift up my head; I thought somebody was getting from under my bed, but soon found it was a strong earthquake, that lasted near half a minute, with a violent vibration and great roaring. I rang

1 There was a notion that King Stanislaus, who lived in Lorraine, was in love with her.-WALPOLE.

2 Dryden's "All for Love."-WALPOLE.

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